Government pushes 700Mhz auction to January 2014, moves application deadline to September 17th

The Government of Canada has pushed the 700Mhz spectrum auction to January 14th, 2014, from the earlier date of November 19th “in light of [the] decisions” from earlier today regarding its denial of TELUS’ spectrum transfer application.

Applications to bid for the auction has been moved from June 11th to September 17th to accommodate for today’s announcement, purportedly to give TELUS, Mobilicity and others an opportunity to alter their plans.

Christian Paradis, the country’s Industry Minister, promises “at least four providers in every region,” lifting restrictions on foreign ownership for companies with under 10% of national market share and ensuring comprehensive tower sharing protocols between new entrants and incumbents.

I hope companies like T-Mobile or AT&T participate in the next auction now that foreirn ownership rules were relaxed.

very depressing

They won’t.

hoo dat

If I’m a foreign telco watching the disaster that is the Canadian market, there is nothing that could convince me to do business here. Nothing.

dfsdf

Damn it. November was already too late. We need the spectrum now, it is available. Why wait?

hardy83

Given the mess the last auction has left us with the industry still pathetic, why little hope is there of a second auction fixing anything? Especially when the incumbents are still able to get some of the spectrum.

dfsdf

giving all the 700 MHz spectrum to Wind and Mobilicity wouldn’t fix anything either as they would still only cover big cities.

fraughtwith

I understand what the benefit of 700Mhz is, but I don’t like the fact that it’s domain will always be limited to Canada/U.S. LTE chipsets will support this and AWS, but probably not the LTE bands used by the rest of the world. GSM and HSPA had good global interoperability.
So unlocked LTE handsets from Europe would do us any good here unless you want to live with just HSPA.

Swordfish

The 2600 mhz range is supported by a lot of europe and asia and Souh America so most new phones should be ok as Bell and Rogers also support that band.
AT&T already uses 700mhz so investment here if the ownership laws are relaxed might be worthwhile. Time will tell…

fraughtwith

Just keep in mind that AT&T only leases a portion of the 700MHz spectrum and Verizon uses the other. That makes LTE between the two carriers non-interoperable (unless you fall back to AWS). I believe our 700MHz spectrum won’t be enough to support the Big 3 in Canada, so look to Rogers to try and align with AT&T but Bell/Telus will likely pick the same spectrum as Verizon.

So your comments about US phones only holds true if you’re careful about picking the one that aligns with your carrier and you don’t plan on jumping carriers.

Also, Verizon doesn’t use HSPA as a fallback to LTE (I believe it’s CDMA) so a Verizon phone would only serve a Bell/Telus customer who is using the phone in an LTE coverage area.

I hate these kind of IF/THEN/ELSE situations, and that’s why I don’t like the concept of 700Mhz being native to just Canada and the U.S.

EvanKrosney

ATT uses 700 MHz, so most US imports will work without problems. However, some of the most interesting and unique phones are European or Asian exclusives, and it’d be a shame to not get full use out of them when you import unless you want to be stuck with Robelus.